Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Andrezej Kunowski: The Little Doctor

Caught in the Act

Trajce Konev stood knocking at the
locked door of his home in the London suburb of Hammersmith. His
12-year-old daughter, Katerina, was home alone. He couldn’t understand
why she didn’t answer.

It was May 22, 1997, two years after
Konev, a Macedonian, had arrived in England with his family as refugees
from the ethnic war in the Balkans.

Hammersmith, London

They were all learning English
together—wife Zaklina; son Christian, 6, and daughter Katerina, a
lovely and lively adolescent with long, sable-colored hair, a bright
smile and eyes the color of mahogany.

Konev was studying at a local college and had been delayed by an exam.

“I raced home fast on my bicycle, because
it was the first time my daughter was alone in the house after school,”
he would later explain. “I expected everything to be all right.”

But it was not all right. She wasn’t answering.

Katerina Koneva

“At first I thought, ‘Katerina may be changing her clothes,’ and waited a few seconds,” he said.

Konev peered through the keyhole and saw
Katerina’s school bag on the floor. He then dropped to his knees and
looked under the door.

“I saw two men’s black shoes,” he said. “I was shocked. I knew she was there … I knew something was wrong.”

Konev banged his shoulder into the door
to no effect, so he ran around the house — just in time to find a
strange man climbing out a window.

“We came face to face,” Konev said. “I
noticed one small drop of blood on the left side of his face…He was
staring at me. I asked him, ‘What are you doing in my house?’ He was
just so calm. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and ran
away. I went after him.”

“Help Me!”

Konev chased the intruder for a few
blocks, but the man managed to turn the tables by hollering for help
just as Konev had him in his clutches.

Two workmen interceded and ordered Konev to back off.

The attacker ran on and jumped in front
of a Fiat. The driver, Christina Kearney, said he hollered, “Help me,
help me, call the police!”

He suddenly brandished a knife, ordered Kearney out of the car and sped off.

Meanwhile, instead of trying to explain
the situation to the workmen with his limited English, Konev ran back
home, pausing to ring a police alarm.

He broke through a chair barricading the door and found young Katerina unconscious on the floor.

Katerina Koneva

She had been choked with a piece of cord cut from a Virgin Atlantic flight bag that Katerina used to tote her books.

The garrote was so taut that Konev could
not release it with his hands. He got a knife and cut the cord from
his daughter’s throat.

“I started to cry and shout her name — ‘Katerina! Katerina!’” Konev said.

A policeman arrived and tried to revive the girl. It was futile. She was beyond saving.

Case Goes Cold

Trajce Koneva

In a cruel twist, Trajce Konev became the initial suspect in the murder.

Police doubted his story about chasing
off an attacker, and he was ordered confined while detectives
investigated. Zaklina Konev arrived at the police station to find
Trajce behind bars wearing a prisoner’s overalls.

She jumped to conclusions — perhaps understandably.

“What have you done to our little girl?” Zaklina demanded.

“I remember just banging my head from
wall to wall in my cell,” Trajce Konev later said. “I couldn’t believe
what was happening. They must have thought I was a madman. They thought
I had killed my Katerina.”

Kunowski running

He was quickly cleared on evidence
that included the eyewitness accounts, a security camera videotape that
showed him chasing the suspect, and fingerprints found on the window
the attacker had climbed through.

Police found another clue that would prove crucial: A single strange hair on Katerina’s sweater.

The investigation revealed that the same
man who killed Katerina had earlier stalked three other adolescents in
Hammersmith. Each girl had long, dark hair, like Katerina.

Detectives surmised he followed the girl
home, made sure she was alone, then knocked. Katerina opened the door,
probably assuming it was her father.

It seemed a simple crime to solve, with both forensic and eyewitness evidence. But the investigation went nowhere.

The killer seemed to have disappeared amid the 7 million people of London.

But he was hiding in plain sight and, in fact, had been in and out of police custody within a month of the murder.

Unfortunately for Katerina Konev’s loved
ones, competence went lacking in this case, despite the sterling
reputation of London’s Metropolitan Police.

But the murderer was accustomed to law
enforcement incompetence. He had benefited from bungling bureaucrats
from one end of Europe to the other.

The killer would prove to be a native of Poland named Andrezej Kunowski, whose career as a rapist would span 30 years.

Mama’s Boy

Andrezej Kunowski at 17

Kunowski was born Andrezej Klembert
in Warsaw in 1956, just after the signing of the Warsaw Pact enshrouded
Poland behind the Iron Curtain.

He was the only child of parents of
questionable character; they stole anything they could get their hands
on. As a result, Kunowski had a troubled boyhood, according to Dan
Newling of London’s Daily Mail newspaper.

Logo: London Daily Mail

At age 2, he was sent off to an
orphanage because his mother, father and maternal grandmother were all
in prison. To boot, his grandfather was locked up in a state
psychiatric hospital for unspecified sexual offenses.

When Elzbieta Klembert was released, she reclaimed her son, divorced her husband, and married a cement mason, Stephan Kunowski.

The family settled in Mlawa, a gritty
city of 30,000 in the Polish lowlands 80 miles north of Warsaw that was
known for producing shoes, milk and meat.

Mlawa had a troubling history.

Map of Poland with Mlawa and Warsaw indicators

During World War II, as many as
7,000 Jews from Mlawa were exterminated. When a handful of Jewish
survivors limped home in 1946, they were aghast to find that Mlawa’s
Poles had excavated graves in the Jewish cemetery and removed gold
teeth, jewelry and other valuables from the corpses, which were then
left to rot in piles.

The hatred of Jews was so intense there
that a memorial to Holocaust victims in Mlawa was destroyed by Poles
again and again after the war. And ethnic hostility persists. In 1991,
Mlawa’s men launched a pogrom against Gypsies in the city.

Growing up in Mlawa in the 1960s, young
Andrezej was viewed as a mama’s boy. And when other children teased him,
Kunowski reacted with a ferocity that seemed out of proportion to the
insult.

He was a small child with mighty fists.
During fights, Andrezej would throttle his foes with a bear-claw grip
until they cried uncle.

He also developed a habit of ogling
pretty girls with a frightening glint in his eye, as though in a
trance. Elzbieta expressed concerned that her son seemed unable to
recall these episodes of fighting or inappropriate staring.

Andrezej also began to steal as his teen
years arrived. Perhaps it was genetic. In any case, at age 13 he was
packed away to a facility for delinquent juveniles, where his various
problems were allowed to fester.

The Little Doctor

Andrezej Kunowski began attacking girls and women soon after he was released from juvenile detention.

From the outset, he seemed to be the
most frightening type of sexual predator. His attacks did not stem from
an occasional random impulse. They were compulsive, coming in
clusters.

Most of his victims were in their teens
and early 20s. The oldest victim was 41, although most of his more
mature targets seemed younger than their actual age. He assaulted at
least three 11-year-olds.

His standard MO was to stalk a pretty
adolescent girl after school. If she was a latchkey child without
after-school supervision, he would break in and attack her.

In other cases, victims were dragged off into bushes or remote fields.

Kunowski’s attacks were based on sheer
strength. He was a brute, not a suave seducer, in the manner of, say,
American serial killer Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy

He certainly did not have Bundy’s
good looks. Kunowski was balding, round and just 5-foot-4. He often
wore a toupee and elevator heels to try to disguise his shortcomings.

The Daily Mail’s Newley reported that
Kunowski dressed himself fastidiously, with shirts carefully tucked in
and shoes shined to a high gloss. He doused himself in cologne.

Kunowski had an oddly formal, Old World
demeanor, bowing and clicking his heels when making a new acquaintance.
His nickname was “maly doktor”—the Little Doctor.

Numbing Attacks

Kunowski wasn’t a clever criminal. But he didn’t need to be smart, as his rap sheet and prison record display.

His first reported rape came in June
1973, when he accosted a neighbor girl in Mlawa. He dragged her into
the bushes and forced himself on her. The victim was acquainted with
Kunowski and readily identified him as her attacker.

Two other teenagers stepped forward to
accuse him in similar attacks, but he was prosecuted for just the one
case and sent to prison for three years.

On July 16, 1977, a month after his
parole, he struck again, attacking a girlish-looking 24-year-old. He
choked the woman until she lost consciousness and likely would have
killed her had witnesses not intervened.

He spent less than nine months in jail
after that attack, then went on a violent tear, traveling back and forth
between Mlawa and Warsaw to find victims.

On April 12, 1978, he attempted to rape a
22-year-old woman who fought him off. Later the same day, he succeeded
in raping a 27-year-old.

On June 23, he robbed and raped a
22-year-old woman, dragging her into bushes. Eight days later he raped a
16-year-old, followed by the rape of a 12-year-old on July 21.

Kunowski’s violent urges seem to ramp
after those attacks. Most of his rapes after July 1978 involved
choking. He often left his victims unconsciousness, although none died.

Experts recognize choking and
strangulation as a singular form of criminal pathology. It is considered
the most intimate variety of assault or murder — more personal and
hands-on than the use of a gun or a knife. And it gives the assailant an
unparalleled sense of domination and control.

On Aug. 4, Kunowski choked and raped a
19-year-old, then pulled identical crimes against a 22-year-old a week
later; a 20-year-old on Sept. 6; a 17-year-old just two days later, and
another 17-year-old on Sept. 20.

In October 1978, he raped, robbed and
choked at least four women in one week—ages 17, 20, 28 and 30. He
accosted four more women and girls in November, ages 19, 21, 15 and
11—the latter his youngest victim yet.

He raped and choked a 16-year-old on Dec. 14, then victimized another 11-year-old three days before Christmas.

On Jan. 25, 1979, Kunowski stole a car that he used for a rampage of sexual violence the next day.

One Jan. 26, he robbed and attempted to
strangle a 41-year-old woman; robbed and groped a 36-year-old woman,
then raped, robbed and choked a 20-year-old woman.

Brief Jail Stay

At long last, Polish police caught up with him and returned him to jail. But his sexual assaults continued even there.

On Feb. 24, he forced a male cellmate to perform oral sex, then raped another cellmate on March 1.

It seemed remarkable enough that Polish
authorities had failed to suspect and arrest Kunowski, a
twice-convicted rapist, during his string of assaults. But the
country’s criminal justice incompetence was merely beginning.

Kunowski somehow escaped from Polish
prison on April 25, 1979. Six weeks later, he raped a 13-year-old girl
he followed home from school.

He was arrested the next day and
returned to prison but escaped yet again that August. He committed more
attacks before he was rearrested.

Andrezej Kunowski

Finally, he faced justice for his long list of crimes, which included 17 sexual assaults and eight attempted rapes.

The prosecutor, Waldemar Smarzewski, sought a long sentence, recognizing that Kunowski had little chance of reform.

“There were about 70 charges, made up of
rapes, attempted rapes, lechery with children, endangering a child’s
life and attempted murder,” Smarzewski told the Daily Mail. “This was a
very important and dangerous case because of the number of victims and
what he did to them. I wanted to put him away for longer because he
was very dangerous. I was sure that if he left prison, he would go back
to rape and maybe even kill.”

Kunowski was sentenced to a total of 30 years. Finally, it seemed that Polish women and children would be saved from him.

But revolution interceded.

When the Communist regime was routed in Poland in 1989, the opening of prison doors became fashionable.

Andrezej Kunowski was one of those who
benefited. He was freed for good behavior in 1991, after serving less
than six years for attacking 23 women and girls and two men.

After his release, Kunowski married and
fathered a daughter. He found work as a cosmetics salesman, and he
seemed to reform for most of a year.

But as always, his compulsion got the best of him.

He Walks Again

On Aug. 12, 1992, he raped another
11-year-old girl in Mlawa, then moved to Warsaw, where he raped two
more adolescents. He was arrested in 1993, but escaped prison yet again
and was on the lam for two years.

In March 1995, the Little Doctor is
believed to have abducted Agnieszka Grzybicka, 14, who disappeared while
walking home from school in Mlawa.

Agnieszka Grzybicka

Two months later, he was arrested in
Warsaw in connection with two attacks that occurred on consecutive
days — both against adolescent girls who, like young Agnieszka, were
followed home from school.

As he awaited trial, Kunowski began
filing medical complaints about persistent pain in his left hip. X-rays
showed no problem, but doctors finally acquiesced in his insistence
that he be scheduled for hip-replacement surgery.

Perhaps no one was more stunned than
Kunowski when, in June 1996, Polish authorities announced that he would
be freed on a medical furlough to await the operation.

It turned out Kunowski’s hip was not bad enough to deter him from running from justice.

The Strait of Dover

He sold his apartment and used the
profits to buy a fake Polish passport. He then boarded a bus in Warsaw
and was waved through border security checks across northern Europe,
through Germany and Belgium and into Calais, France, where he boarded a
ferry that crossed the Strait of Dover to England.

On Oct. 15, 1996, he arrived by bus at London’s Victoria Coach Station on Buckingham Palace Road.

No one would have noticed him.

Each day, more than 300,000 people pass through Victoria, a bustling amalgam of bus, train and Underground stations.

Then as now, Polish nationals poured into London each day on tourist visas to look for work. Kunowski blended right in.

Victoria Coach Station, London

When Polish authorities realized
that Kunowski had left, they issued an international warrant through
Interpol. His photograph and fingerprints were made available via
Interpol’s crime database to its 125 member countries — the United
Kingdom among them.

But Kunowski was not fingerprinted when
he arrived in the United Kingdom, so British authorities had no way of
knowing that a notorious sex fiend had arrived there.

He had a clean slate to find new victims in a fresh country.

Medical Benefits

The attack on Katerina Konev, 219 days after Kunowski arrived in England, had not gone as he planned.

First, Kunowski had been interrupted by
the arrival of the child’s father. The Little Doctor had to abort the
assault before reaching the sick sexual gratification he got from
throttling children.

And the close contact with witnesses —
including Trajce Konev, the two workmen, and Christina Kearney, owner
of the hijacked car — placed him at peril of being identified.

Andrezej Kunowski

He lived in Acton, just a few miles
from the scene of the crime in Hammersmith. He assumed — incorrectly —
that these clues might soon lead Scotland Yard’s finest to the door of
his flat.

Patch: New Scotland Yard

He decided to get out of town.

The day after the murder, Kunowski gave
up his room in Acton and fled to the countryside, taking a job at a
strawberry farm in Ledbury, west of London.

But stealing, his genetic Achilles heel, cost him the job after just a month.

The Birmingham Sunday Mercury said he was accused of filching cash from the office at Siddington Farms.

“He was a bit of a strange one — a
loner, I suppose,” said farm manager Glyn Lewis. “We had hundreds of
different workers on the farm, but he always stuck out in my mind.”

He was arrested for theft, but Britain
dropped that charge and focused on deportation when it learned that he
was in the country illegally. After first claiming Portuguese
citizenship, Kunowski admitted he was a Pole.

He had one last gambit: Kunowski applied
for asylum under an economic hardship. While his application was being
considered, he was allowed to walk free, once again.

His petition was denied in the fall of 1997. But by then, Kunowski had gotten lost in London.

He hadn’t even been fingerprinted after his arrest, let alone subjected to a DNA swabbing.

Tragic Bungling

In 1998, British immigration authorities
received a letter from Kunowski saying that he had returned to Poland.
It was postmarked from Poland, but likely had been sent by Kunowski’s
mother.

Immigration officials continued to list Kunowski as “missing,” although there was no active attempt to find him.

It couldn’t have been too difficult. The Little Doctor likely never left London.

The evidence was at hand in automobile
and apartment rental records. He owned a Renault automobile that he
kept registered and insured. And his mother traveled from Poland to
visit him in his Acton apartment at least three times in the late
1990s.

In 2001, British taxpayers treated the
wanted illegal immigrant to heart bypass at Hammersmith Hospital,
located a block from the apartment where he strangled Katerina Konev.

In July 2002, Kunowski was arrested for
collecting welfare benefits under the name Jose Marco da Dias. But
again he was released before anyone made a connection to the Konev
killing or his history as a sexual predator in Poland.

Conviction & Sentence

Another crime finally brought him down.

On Sept. 22, 2002, Kunowski was
loitering in the London Underground station at Ealing Broadway,
probably looking for potential victims.

He spotted a young woman, a recent arrival from Korea who looked younger than her 21 years.

Kunowski moved close enough to see that she was looking at advertisements of rooms for rent.

He struck up a conversation with the woman, whose English was even more halting than his.

Andrezej Kunowski

Kunowski explained that he could
help her find a cheap room at his boarding house in Acton, and she
agreed to accompany him there.

Once inside his room, Kunowski attacked. He tied the woman up and subjected her to a brutal three-hour rape.

She said he choked her until she nearly
passed out. She talked her way to freedom by promising to phone
Kunowski the next day to schedule another visit.

As noted, he wasn’t a clever criminal.

Instead, the victim went to police, and Kunowski was arrested and charged with rape.

At trial in May 2003 at London’s Old
Bailey, Kunowski claimed the sex was consensual — a “thank you” because
he helped her find a place to stay.

London’s Old Bailey

The judge dismissed his alibi as absurd, and Kunowski was convicted and sentenced to nine years.

But even then, the British had no reason to believe that Kunowski was a serial rapist and murderer.

Only after the conviction did the extent
of his predation — and the government bungling that allowed him to
attack again and again — become clear.

DNA Finally Shared

After he was sent to prison, Kunowski’s identity and DNA profile were shared with other countries via the Interpol database.

Through that data, Polish authorities
realized that the British convict was the serial rapist who had
absconded while on medical furlough.

Scotland Yard compared its DNA sample
from Kunowski with DNA from swab evidence taken after the 1995 rape of
one of the adolescent girls in Warsaw. It matched.

The match prompted British police to begin looking at unsolved attacks on adolescent girls there.

Within days, both DNA and fingerprint evidence linked Andrezej Kunowski, at long last, to the murder of Katerina Konev.

He was charged in that case on July 29, 2003.

Kunowski claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.

But the damning physical evidence was
coupled with eyewitness testimony from Trajce Konev, the victim of the
auto theft and others.

A jury of eight men and four women took
less than three hours to render a guilty verdict — even though jurors
were denied access to information about Kunowski’s long history of
attacks.

The British press, too, learned only at trial’s end the extent of his history of rape and the government bungles.

As Detective Chief Inspector David
Little put it, “He is probably the most dangerous sex offender I have
ever come across and certainly the most prolific.”

The press gave the Little Doctor a new nickname: the Beast of Poland.

Judge Peter Beaumont handed down the maximum sentence of life in prison.

Judge Peter Beaumont

“I would be failing in my duty, in
the light of the evidence about your behavior both in Poland and this
country,” Beaumont said, “if I did not ensure you spend the rest of
your life in prison. …You took the life of a child who was just
beginning to enjoy what this country had to offer her and her family as
refugees from hardship abroad. It was a life of great promise. You
ended it in circumstances of great violence and terror.”

“Matter of Concern”

The British Home Office admitted it was a “matter of concern” that Kunowski had not been unmasked as a wanted man years before.

Asylum-seekers are now fingerprinted and
scrutinized through Interpol, although British law still does not
mandate DNA testing of illegal immigrants.

But Inspector Little defended the British criminal justice system.

He said Kunowski managed to slip through
the cracks because he was, as an illegal alien, invisible to the
British criminal justice system.

“If the person doesn’t exist,” he said, “you can’t bring him to justice.’

Little said Kunowski has now been scrutinized in connection with numerous other unsolved rapes and murders of women.

And although he has not been
definitively linked to any additional cases, Little said Kunowski’s
criminal history leaves not doubt that he was likely responsible for
many other sex crimes during his time in Britain.

“When he wasn’t incarcerated, he was committing offenses,” Little said.

Reaction from Poland

The Polish government has said that it would like to prosecute Kunowski should he ever be freed in Britain.

But it is unlikely the U.K. would turn him over to the country that bungled his incarceration and prosecution so many times.

“I knew he would strike again,” said
Waldemar Smarzewski, the Polish prosecutor. “He should remain behind
bars for the rest of his life. I am sorry this psychopath ever came to
Britain.”

His mother, Elzbieta Kunowski, defended her son in an interview with the Daily Mail.

“He is ill, not evil,” she said. “He needs proper medical and psychological care. … He is my son and I love him.”

She said they talk often by phone, and her son always praises the British penal system’s good food and good medical care.

If his left hip is getting achy, he hadn’t mentioned it.

Lives Ruined

Zaklina Konev

The murder of Katerina Konev left her family devastated and embittered.

In a statement at Kunowski’s sentencing,
Zaklina Konev said, “I find it impossible to understand how he was
allowed into the UK to commit this crime. … I hope that this evil
murderer burns in hell. Knowing he is in prison is not enough for me. I
hope he suffers every minute of the rest of his life.”

The child’s parents split up in 2000, four years after the murder.

Trajce Konev said they could not
overcome the barrier created when his wife, seeing him in jail, accused
him of murdering their daughter.

Katerina Koneva

“I had lost my little girl, but my
wife was attacking me, and my 6-year-old son was looking up at me with
hate in his eyes,” he told reporters.

“Things were never the same. The anger
and hate afterwards was unbearable,” he said. “I would argue all the
time with my wife. It was small things that would set us off — anything
which reminded us of the pain of losing Katerina. I frequently told my
wife I hated her. It was awful. I felt like I had gone mad with grief
… Finally we could take no more of each other and we split up.”

Konev, a Web site designer, said he attempted suicide but has resolved to live for the sake of his son, now a teenager.

Zaklina Konev says grief hangs like a dark cloud over their lives.

She said she buys gifts for her daughter at Christmastime, and she carries on imaginary conversations with the dead child.

“I talk to her every day,” she said. “We say goodnight to our children, don’t we? So I always say goodnight to my daughter.”

The child’s father, meanwhile, said he drew solace from Kunowski’s conviction.

“I had finally beaten the devil,” said
Trajce Konev. “I knew this man could never again do to anyone else what
he had done to my angel.”